Saudi Columnist: Arabs Must Stop Blaming Israel For Their Own Extremism

MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty DEBORAH DANAN29 Oct 2016

TEL AVIV – The world would be better off without the Middle East and blaming Israel for rampant extremism, ignorance and infighting in Arab nations is futile and shallow, a Saudi columnist wrote in the country’s Al-Watan daily.

The world “could have been a safer and quieter place had the Middle East not been in its midst,” Dr. Ali Sa’d Al-Moussa claimed in an article translated Tuesday by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

The “blood-soaked” region, Al-Moussa said, has seen even worse strife than the Koreas and the Rwandan genocide.

“And I ask that none of you place the blame for this on Israel, for that is [just] a shallow excuse,” Al-Moussa writes.

He adds that “Israel has nothing to do with the struggle between ISIS and [Jabhat] Al-Nusra” or with any of the bloodshed in Yemen or Libya.

He goes on to note that in the last five years of internecine fighting, Arabs have killed ten times more people from their own ranks than were killed in 50 years of wars with Israel.

According to Al-Moussa, people who originate in the Middle East carry a “gene of an unknown virus in our body, which soon awakens and multiplies,” and triggers “destruction and war, hatred, exclusion and the despicable categorizing” of people.

“So who is to blame for this? The culprit is the awakening of ignorance,” he writes.

Al-Moussa continues by waxing nostalgic about the Arab world of the 1950s. He notes that Egypt had the first printing press outside Europe, even before Japan and China, and was also the world’s third-largest producer of films.

Whereas Tunisia once boasted that nearly all school-age boys were actually in schools, these days the country provides the largest number of recruits to the Islamic State terror group.

Al-Moussa summarizes by reiterating his claim that Arabs are born with “the gene of the unknown virus of war, which comes to life the minute an Arab youth is able to carry a dagger or a sword.”